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  • Homeloss
  • Qinglan Wang (bio)

Local

Local or Kam'āina is someone who grew up in Hawai'i but is not necessarily of Native Hawaiian ancestry.

Location and geography act as identity markers. The social question where did you come from? is a way to discover how Local one is to the Islands. This singular question highlights:

  1. 1. the immediate distance you traveled to the meeting location;

  2. 2. how different/similar your experience of a particular place is related to another's (i.e., high school, shared friends/family circles, familiarity of food establishments);

  3. 3. how many generations you can trace back to a specific location and how much of an insider you are.

The label of Hawaiian, or Native Hawaiian, refers to Polynesians living in Hawai'i before the arrival of British explorers. There are no Hawaiian tribes, only lineage, generations, descendants tracing back to the Polynesians who first settled the islands thousands of years before Western contact. Distinct in their culture, heritage, and ethnicity from the rest of the people living on the Islands (Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Portuguese, etc.), Native Hawaiians see themselves as separate from Native Americans. [End Page 77]

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Locals refer to the continental United States as "the Mainland." Locals are constantly aware of the geographical separation of Hawai'i from the rest of the world. This attention to division, the constant comparison of what life is like on the Islands versus anywhere else, defines what it means to be Local.

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Tell everyone on the Mainland you're Hawaiian. They not going to know the difference. Besides, you look different already. Your nose can pass you as Hawaiian. You going to be more different on the Mainland. Good to be different. Go stand out. Hawai'i is the last part of you, the closest thing you got left to a culture.

My Aunty Yilan, having acquired English as her fifth language after Chinese, German, Italian, and French, takes advantage of every opportunity to be different. Twenty years retired, the mezzo-soprano in her always finds the right pitch.

Pidgin

Hawai'i Creole English, commonly known as Hawaiian Pidgin or Pidgin, is a debased form of English. Pidgin, a bastardization of forms, takes diction and vocabulary from two or more languages to create hybridity between people lacking a common language.

Pidgin—a meld of Hawaiian, English, Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese—marks the people who morphed the Islands over the course of occupation.

Once American capitalists discovered the Islands' resources, manifest destiny spilled overseas. They first pushed Native Hawaiian families off fertile lands. Then the rise of sugarcane, pineapple, and coffee plantations brought waves of Japanese and Chinese immigrant laborers. Portuguese acted as lunas (bosses) who oversaw the plantation work. Longhorn cattle were introduced, followed by Mexican vaqueros (expert horsemen), leading to paniolo, the Hawaiian cowboy. When the Japanese and Chinese workers held labor strikes against indentured servitude conditions, the oligarchs brought in Korean, Puerto Rican, and Filipino immigrants to break the strike. Quietly, they worked faster for cheaper conditions.

Pidgin, the hybrid bond, is fast, dirty plantation talk. The first generation of immigrants retained their native tongue and hacked words into a cobbled Pidgin. The later generations smoothed it out, learning Pidgin [End Page 78] English as their native tongue and codifying it into a refined badge of blue-collar pride.

Pidgin is also an arcane term for business, an occupation, an action. The term stems from British ships trading with the Chinese, where they observed the Chinese could not pronounce business but instead said bigeon, which morphed phonetically to pigeon or pidgin.

Accent

To leave a homeland is to remain different. Homeloss is a process of change.

You've lost your accent, observed an old friend. You had this way of speaking, a strange dip in the middle, a lilt at the end of your sentences. Rough and uneven but distinct to the Islands. Now, you sound like everyone else. Proper, from the Mainland. If I closed my eyes, you would be anyone else but you.

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There are eight muscles in the human tongue. Four intrinsic muscles, unattached to the bone, change the overall shape. Four extrinsic muscles, anchored to...

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